Based on different application requirements, the radio communications field develops various radio communications standards. Long Term Evolution (LTE) is a main technology of fourth generation (4G) mobile communications, and has advantages such as a large transmission range, high mobility, and high reliability. In another aspect, a Wireless Local Area Network (Wireless Local Area Network, WLAN) may be operated in an unlicensed spectrum without paying for a license fee of a frequency band. Therefore, costs for deployment and expansion may be effectively reduced, and the WLAN also becomes a much common communications network.
In order to satisfy requirements of a user for improving a transmission capacity of a communications system, the Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) brings in, in standards of the Long Term Evolution Advanced (LTE-A), technologies of Carrier Aggregation (CA) and Dual Connectivity (DC). The CA and DC technologies may transmit and receive data at the same time through a plurality of carriers, so that the communications system may achieve a higher transmission bandwidth. Under architecture of Downlink LTE-WLAN Aggregation (DL LWA), user equipment (User Equipment, UE) may use an LTE network and a WLAN network at the same time to receive downlink data. FIG. 1 is a schematic diagram illustrating LWA network architecture. Using FIG. 1 as an example, after the LWA technology is started to transmit data, an Evolved Node B (eNB or eNodeB) may offload, through a backhaul network, downlink data receiving from a core network to a WLAN access point. On this basis, while receiving a part of the transmitted data through a licensed spectrum from the eNB, the UE may also receive, through the unlicensed spectrum, transmission data of an offloaded portion from the WLAN access point.
Generally, in order to support the LWA network architecture, the UE needs to be installed with two communication chips which support an LTE communication protocol and the WLAN (for example: series IEEE 802.11), respectively. Running the two communication chips at the same time is easy to increase power consumption of the UE. Therefore, a set of energy-saving methods which may be applied to the UE applying the LWA technology needs to be developed.